6 hours of Delicious Skating Goodness

3 practices this week! 6 hours of delicious skating goodness. I couldn't be more excited. Sadly, there is just not enough time for me to write this entry covering all three as well as I would like. Being a major klutz I also sustained a pretty painful injury this week.

Which had absolutely NOTHING to do with derby, but was incurred while existing in the Peter Parker portion of my life. Hee hee. "Peter Parker portion. Peter Parker portion". Say that several times fast.

It was an especially hectic lunchtime with the kiddos on Thursday. One plus to the pandemonium (oooo what an excellent derby name that would be..."Pam DeMonium") was that I was getting a ton of squats and lunges in, constantly picking up the various objects, sippy cups, and dog-toxic grapes and raisins that were being flung.

Yes people, I am just that much of a nerd. Treating every retrieval as a chance to work my lunges and squats. I also sometimes do this throughout my day with my one year old and her 20ish pounds in tow. She enjoys the ride and I get in some weighted squats with the boy dancing around us as we listen to his musical requests.

The one time I slipped out of my work out routine and bent over from my waist (all of you Alexander Tech people would have shuddered..) to pick some child type thing up during lunch I stupidly smacked my eye socket/brow into a chair and howled in agony. I saw stars, I actually felt my eyeball get nudged back into the socket, and momentarily forgot my boy's name. Luckily we haven't completely succeeded in breaking his habit of speaking of himself in third person and that brain fart was corrected. I went to the mirror and watched the lump on my eyebrow grow and the inside corner of my eye turn black. I held an ice pack on and off for the rest of lunch and surprisingly the blackening went away.

All I wanted to do in that moment was sit with the dog's head in my lap and moan or maybe whimper for a bit. My head and eyeball hurt so badly, I was dizzy and my vision in that eye was blurry. Aldo was yelling and Oona was deep in her normal mealtime insanity, vehemently refusing most foods I put in front of her. But I had to pull it together because my kids are little (2 1/2 and 1) and they were getting freaked. What helped me do that was the previous night's practice, knowing it was especially challenging and that I had done it.

One drill we did was bonkers fun, kind of like Navy Seal practice on skates. I believe some of the girls refer to it as "Satan's Mattress" or something to that extent. It involves sprinting a lap, then sliding on a knee or two, dropping and doing increasing amounts of pushups, situps and holding plank position. We did this for a long time, often with 25 push or sit ups in between sprints. Total fun. Crazy, sweaty, heart pounding, adrenaline rushing, derby high fun. The memory of that specific drill is what brought me back to my little yellow kitchen and the importance of regaining my composure.

After Wednesday's practice my "extended adrenaline rush super power" must have kicked in again. Seriously, what is with my muscles? I am never sore until a few days after practice. I felt nothing all day Thursday. And nothing all day Friday, until about 9 PM. At that time some internal clock went off and my muscles began screaming at me, pleading for epsom salts and ibuprofen.

If this was Pee Wee's Playhouse the secret word would be duality. In case my witty banter isn't enough and you want to have some extra fun with this blog, you know what to do when you read that word.

So duality. I'm thinking of the balance of several two-fold things this week. First, the co-existence of slow and fast twitch muscle fibers. We all have both types within our muscles. The fast twitch fibers are utilized for more explosive movements like sprinting and the slow are more for endurance, like in marathoners. It's so fascinating to me as an Alexander Technique teacher to observe people at practice. Derby really requires both groups of muscle fibers, but it is so clear which type of movement a skater is more geared towards in her musculature. I'm certain that although we may be more predisposed towards one or the other in our muscle composition it is still possible through training to round ourselves out a bit. You can see it in the more veteran skaters. I observe in myself that I must be more slow twitch in my composition because the endurance stuff is way easier for me and I really need to put a fire under it for the things that require super quick, explosive movement.

The other instance of duality I continue to ponder this week is how my derby and momming lives affect each other. There are times that I feel like all this super hero training, endurance, full contact, and quick footwork on skates we do at practice is actually easier than what I deal with all day with the kiddos. Yesterday we were seeing how many burpees we could do in a minute. That's the exercise when you are standing, jump up in the air, drop to the floor and jump back into a squat thrust, hands on the floor, plank position. Repeat. While on skates, it's easiest if you do the whole thing on your toe stops. I did 18. And I LOVED it. Totally fun, and somehow strangely easier than lunchtime at my house. Still rushing on a derby high, I insisted on demonstrating this exercise to the hubster when I got home and the kids were having lunch. (in my kitchen and of course with skates) The kids thoroughly enjoyed the show,by her screams of approval I'm absolutely certain Oona is a future derby girl, and after 14 years of wedded bliss if he didn't already my husband now believes I am a lunatic.

I wonder about the levels of challenge in my life, why all this derby stuff often seems easier to me than my days with the kids. When I practically gouged my eyeball out on Thursday it was the toughness of derby that got me through that moment, remembering I was a warrior.  On more exhausted, negative days I tell myself my struggles with the kids are because I'm a terrible mom. After I talk myself down from that I think maybe it's because I'm only responsible for myself in derby, and not constantly needing to monitor whether the kids have constructed a ladder of mega blocks and are hanging from the ceiling fan or messing with the poor sainted dog's genitals. I love the space it gives me to be with myself on so many different levels, the room I have to think, sweat and experience. We skate really fast but somehow within that framework it's timeless and I have plenty of room to slow down and enjoy the ride.